Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

David H. Pryor, who was a U.S. senator from Arkansas in 1980, helped me to understand the state’s political culture at the time and shared his long-standing concerns about the Titan II. One of his former aides, James L. “Skip” Rutherford III, described his own investigation of the missile’s safety and his secret meetings with airmen from Little Rock Air Force Base. I tracked down one of those airmen, who spoke to me, off the record, and confirmed Rutherford’s account. At the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, I found many useful memos and documents about the Titan II in the David H. Pryor Papers, especially in Group II, Boxes 244–84.

Most important, perhaps, I spoke to people who played leading roles in the Damascus accident and its aftermath. I am grateful to all those who shared their recollection of the events at Launch Complex 374-7, at Little Rock Air Force Base, at the underground command post of the Strategic Air Command in Omaha, the headquarters of the Eighth Air Force in Louisiana, and elsewhere. Some of the most useful details were provided by Jeffrey L. Plumb and David F. Powell, who were in the missile silo when the socket fell; Allan D. Childers and Rodney Holder, who were in the launch control center; Colonel John T. Moser, the head of the 308th Strategic Missile Wing, who was at the Little Rock command post; Major Vincent O. Maes, the maintenance supervisor at the 308th, who advised Moser that night; Colonel Jimmie D. Gray, the commander of the 308th Missile Inspection and Maintenance Squadron, who was at both the Little Rock command post and the accident site; Colonel Ben Scallorn, the deputy chief of staff for Missiles and Space Systems Support at headquarters, Eighth Air Force, a Titan II expert who spent hours on the Missile Potential Hazard Net; General Lloyd R. Leavitt, the vice commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command, who made many of the crucial decisions about what should be done; Colonel Ronald Bishop, who took over the 308th Strategic Missile Wing a few months after the accident; David Rossborough and Jerrell M. Babb, who served on the Disaster Response Force; Jeff Kennedy and Greg Devlin, two of the airmen who reentered the launch complex in the early morning hours to save the missile; Donald V. Green, a security police officer, and James R. Sandaker, a member of PTS Team B, who tried to rescue Kennedy; Bob Peurifoy and William H. Chambers, who were part of the Accident Response Group sent to Damascus by the Department of Energy; and members of the Explosive Ordnance Demolition team sent there to disassemble the warhead. I was also helped a great deal by many who preferred not to be named.

After reading the testimony and/or interview transcripts of more than one hundred people somehow involved with the accident, I found that no two of them remembered it exactly the same way. Their accounts differed and sometimes conflicted, about details large and small. The narrative presented in this book is my version of what occurred, based on careful scrutiny of the available evidence. When someone’s memory, thirty years after the fact, seemed at odds with his official testimony under oath, I gave much greater credence to the latter. All of the dialogue and all of the thoughts attributed to people in this book come directly from their testimony or from interviews. None was invented by me. A more definitive account of the Damascus accident would include, as a primary source, the transcript of what was said by high-ranking Air Force officers on the Missile Potential Hazard Net. The discussion was recorded, but the Air Force refused to give me a copy of the tape. I have filed a request for it under the Freedom of Information Act.

Sid King, Gus Anglin, Sam Hutto, and other residents of Van Buren County, Arkansas, told me about the civilian response to the accident. Reba Jo Parish and her late husband, Ralph, graciously allowed me to wander the land on their farm where Launch Complex 374-7 once stood. My visits to the Titan Missile Museum in Arizona provided a strong sense of how 374-7 must have looked and felt before the explosion. The museum is located at a decommissioned Titan II site, and everything has been carefully preserved, including an actual missile in the silo. All that’s missing are the propellants, the launch crew, and a nuclear warhead. I’m grateful to Yvonne Morris, the museum’s director, and to Chuck Penson, its archivist and historian, for all their help. Morris served on a Titan II crew and shared her perspective on those years. Penson showed me around the complex and helped me explore the many documents, training manuals, and videos in the museum’s collection. Penson’s book — The Titan II Handbook: A Civilian’s Guide to the Most Powerful ICBM America Ever Built (Tucson: Chuck Penson, 2008) — provides an excellent, well-illustrated overview of the weapon system. A book by David K. Stumpf looks at the subject in greater detail: Titan II: A History of a Cold War Missile Program (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2000). Stumpf not only did an extraordinary amount of original research for his book, he also donated all of its source materials to the Titan museum, a generous act.

Contemporary newspaper accounts were another good source of information about the Titan II and the Damascus accident. Walter Pincus, a correspondent for the Washington Post , did a particularly fine job of investigating the missile system, ignoring Air Force denials, and seeking the facts. The New York Times , the Arkansas Gazette , and the Arkansas Democrat also covered the story well. I’m grateful to Randy Dixon, the former news director at KATV-TV in Little Rock, and to Albert Kamas, an attorney in Wichita, who helped me to find local television coverage of problems with the Titan II.

The literature about nuclear weapons is vast, and I tried to read as much of it as possible. A number of books stand apart from the rest; the quality of their thinking and prose match the importance of the subject matter. John Hersey’s Hiroshima (New York: Knopf, 2003) is one of the greatest works of nonfiction ever written. Compassionate and yet tough minded, Hersey calmly describes the destruction of a city without hyperbole or sentimentality. Despite all the horrific imagery, the book is ultimately about the resilience of human beings, not their capacity for evil. The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), by Richard Rhodes, is another classic. Rhodes skillfully conveys the drama and high stakes of the Manhattan Project, the clash of big egos and great minds. He also explains the science, physics, and technical details of the first nuclear weapons with admirable clarity. Much like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Jungle , Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth (New York: Knopf, 1982) had an electrifying effect when it was first published and helped to create a social movement. The book retains its power, more than thirty years later. An extraordinary biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin — American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Vintage Books, 2006) — uses the genius, idealism, contradictions, and hypocrisy of one man to shed light on an entire era of American history. Perhaps my favorite book about nuclear weapons is one of the most beautifully written and concise. John McPhee’s The Curve of Binding Energy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974) not only has great literary merit, it also prompted engineers at Sandia to confront the possibility that terrorists might try to steal a nuclear weapon. Martin J. Sherwin and John McPhee were both professors of mine a long time ago, and the integrity of their work, the scholarship and ambition, set a high standard to which I’ve aspired ever since.